Keep your eyes open for some celebrity CEO sightings in the Seattle region over the next few days. Executives coming to town include IAC’s Barry Diller, Walmart Chairman Rob Walton, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, along with his lieutenant Charlie Munger.

In such events, Microsoft can do undisclosed lobbying without traveling much. Watch the caption which says: “Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Clayton Christensen at last year’s CEO Summit. (Microsoft photo)”

This seems like another PR attempt from Microsoft, which is trying to acquire trust in the Arab world. Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity & Water recently moved to Red Hat [1, 2, 3, 4], but Microsoft’s strong push in Kuwait carries on. It strives to control ICT in these rich places.

Moving on a little, we still look at political aspects of the meeting. Guess who else came to Microsoft’s event? It’s Bill Gates’ patent mate, Timothy Geithner, who helps Gates promote Monsanto for fun and profit. Just how political are those Microsoft events? They have queens and even the US treasury secretary inside them. Here is some coverage about it:

The Treasury Department says he’ll tour the Boeing plant in Renton and visit the Port of Tacoma with Gov. Chris Gregoire. He’ll also have a private meeting with bankers and attend the Microsoft CEO summit.

Geithner toured Boeing’s 737 plant in Renton before heading south for a rain-drenched walk around the Port of Tacoma. He also met with community bankers to discuss the environment for small-business lending and attended the Microsoft CEO Summit dinner.

He met with representatives of community banks at the port offices, and was scheduled to address the Microsoft CEO summit, a gathering of business leaders from around the world, Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Geithner is getting too close to Microsoft and Gates after his fiasco with the banks, especially Goldman Sachs. We included dozens of links about that in our daily postings.

As we have shown before, Microsoft uses Twitter for its AstroTurf campaigns. Posts on the subject include:

Like Wonderwall, the political-fame site will pull in content from Microsoft’s MSN and other sources, a Microsoft spokesperson said. The new site will be distributed through the MSNBC Digital Network (including MSNBC.com, TodayShow.com, NBCsports.com, Newsvine, EveryBlock and other properties) and will be heavily promoted on MSN.com.

That translates to more Microsoft control in the press. Do we really need to accept private political meetings at corporate venues and also control of the press by them? It threatens a free democracy. █

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What Else is New

The GNOME Board of Directors works for IBM and/or Microsoft at GitHub; it’s not entirely surprising that despite opposition from some GNOME developers the head of the GNOME Foundation, preceded by people who have since defected to Microsoft, described Dr. Richard Stallman as “reprehensible” and called for him to step down (from his very own thing, never mind the “G” in GNOME standing for GNU)

Principled, opinionated, self-governing individuals aren't any good for corporations looking to not only use their projects but to totally control those projects (copyleft licences such as GPL already make that hard enough for them, so it takes more time for legal 'hacks' such as software patents, "clown computing" and GitHub)

Certain groups that claim to represent the values of "Open Source" are in fact promoting the interests of Microsoft, GitHub etc. (i.e. monopoly or "open" as in a bunch of monopolies like Facebook and Microsoft sharing code snippets/resources over GitHub)

Torvalds and others who are middle-aged (or older) males are often torpedoed using weakly-backed allegations (or insinuations/innuendo) of sexism; that does not seem to matter and won't matter when they treat men the same (or worse)

Linus Torvalds was not fully canceled; nor was Richard Stallman, who's still heading the GNU Project (under conditions specified by those looking to oust him; people who code for Microsoft GitHub and many IBM employees)

General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Board of Red Hat, explains (keynote in 2011 Red Hat Summit/JBoss World) that he was introduced to the system as part of a military campaign; it basically helped war, not antiwar

Techrights examines Red Hat’s (IBM’s) hypocritical claims about the Free Software Foundation, founded by Richard Stallman back when IBM was the “big scary monopolist”; IBM employees were prominent among those pushing to oust Stallman from the GNU Project, which he founded, as well

The (in)famous letter against Richard Stallman (RMS), which was signed by many Red Hat employees with Microsoft (GitHub) accounts, doesn’t look particularly good in light of recent revelations/findings; it increasingly looks like IBM simply wants Microsoft-hosted and “permissively” licensed stuff, just like another project it announced yesterday and another that it promoted yesterday

One might not expect this from a so-called 'charity'; the Gates Foundation's critics are often met with unprecedented aggression, threats and retribution, which make one wonder if it's really a charity or a greedy cult of personalities (Bill and Melinda)

The assault on the media by Bill Gates is a subject not often explored by the media (maybe because a lot of it is already bribed by him); but we're beginning to gather new and important evidence that explains how critics are muzzled (even fired) and critical pieces spiked, never to see the light of day anywhere

Microsoft buying GitHub does not demonstrate that Microsoft loves Open Source (GitHub is not Open Source and may never be) but that it loves monopoly and coercion (what GitHub is all about and why it must be rejected)

The European Patent Office (EPO) keeps granting fake patents that cause a lot of real harm (examiners are pressured to play along and participate in this unlawful agenda); nobody is happy except those who profit from needless, frivolous lawsuits

After contributing to the cancellation of Richard Stallman (RMS) based on some falsehoods perpetuated in the media we're seeing the sort of thing one might expect from IBM (more so now that it totally controls Fedora and RHEL)